Heretofore, the task of handling ammunition for large caliber artillery pieces has been highly labor intensive and time consuming. In the case of howitzers, an ammunition round is typically comprised of two components, a projectile and a propellant, which are stored and handled separately. To load a howitzer, a projectile is manually inserted in the gun breech, followed by the propellant charge, typically packaged in bags. The bags are segmented like a string of sausages and the loader typically must remove unwanted segments to provide the correct propellant charge or zone. Under these circumstances, the firing rate is quite slow. Resupplying an artillery piece is also a slow procedure. In the case of a mobile or self-propelled howitzer, for example, projectiles and propellant charges must be manually transferred from a field ammunition depot or resupply vehicle and stowed in separate magazines.
To reduce the number of military personnel required and to save time, both in terms of resupplying and loading artillery pieces, it has been proposed to provide automated handling equipment for feeding ammunition into a magazine for storage, maintaining the ammunition in a safe and secure magazine storage location, and subsequently feeding the ammunition out of the magazine to the gun for firing. Except for their typically greater size and weight, projectiles are reasonably analogous to cartridged ammunition rounds, and thus approaches utilized heretofore in the automated magazine handling of cartridge rounds can be adapted to projectile magazine handling. This is not the case with respect to propellant charges which present altogether different automated handling considerations. The traditional bag propellant, due to its unique physical characteristics, does not readily lend itself to automated handling.